Dr Dilantha Gunawardana is a molecular biologist, who graduated from the University of Melbourne. He moonlights as a poet. Dilantha wrote his first poem at the ripe age of 32 and now has more than 1700 poems on his blog. His poems have been accepted/published in Forage, Kitaab, Eastlit, American Journal of Poetry and Ravens Perch, among others. He was also awarded the prize for "The emerging writer of the year - 2016" in the Godage National Literary Awards, Sri Lanka for his first collection of poems (Kite Dreams – A Sarasavi Publication), while being shortlisted for the poetry prize. Dilantha is a dual citizen of Sri Lanka and Australia, and shares his experiences from two different cultures. He blogs at - https://meandererworld. wordpress.com/

Day: January 8, 2017

You travel across, through the tumbling waves
From the blues, a blue note strikes ever so frequent
An anomaly, a staccato, an accentuation, the fear
That convulses your wave-barraged heart.
All you have is courage, to beat the legions of sea creatures,
The octopuses with numerous tentacles that lasso
You like the body of a python and the barnacles
That attach to your skin with their cement glands and drain
You of much needed mental strength.

You battle armies of jellyfish, squeezing out toxins
Though their tentacles, a myriad of chemicals, that poisons
Your nervous system, as you heart hears the cries of sailors
Swallowed by the ocean. Waves crashing, devouring the zombie flesh
Already soggy, cold and tearing into filaments.
And slowly, when you least expect, you develop gills that drain oxygen
And a tail and fins that pushes you in locomotion.

And if you’re one of the lucky ones, you meet
Dinoflagellates, fire flies of the ocean, with tetrapyrole
Rings of luciferin, glowing, the beacons to your
Lost, compass-less, wayward journey, guiding you through
As the blue notes gets louder and more frequent with time.

Courage emanates in every stroke, every stumble
Flotation becomes a battle against odds, until you find
A sandy terrace to disembark. Melancholy unloads
From your system, as you leave behind your gills
And fins and grow lungs – pleura, vessels, bronchi
And nerves, leaving a vast blue dominion.

In hindsight, you realize that the ocean was a necessity
To swim past blue tides to where the grass is greener
When all you need is a green thumb
To grow little harvests in your orchard.
All it takes is one apple to desalinate the ocean years.
– When an apple hangs from the tips of your cones and rods
To be handpicked by the outreaching heart.